


in the room where you sleep

by silver_and_exact



Category: L.A. Confidential (1997)
Genre: Alcohol, Anxiety, Bisexual Male Character, Everything is Beautiful and Something Hurts, Feelings Realization, Fluff, Gay Panic, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Insomnia, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Not Beta Read, Post-Canon, Resolved Sexual Tension, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Your old pal the Kinsey Scale, a touch of that old time internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:45:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_and_exact/pseuds/silver_and_exact
Summary: Bud White won't stop wandering into Exley's room and just... sleeping.  It's freaking Ed out.





	in the room where you sleep

It started not long after Bud White's car came back from Bisbee one occupant short, the remainder looking for a place to stay. 

Things were relatively normal for a little while—they didn’t see much of one another, traveling in separate orbits: Exley throwing himself into reforming the LAPD with a dogged resolve that somewhat unnerved him, Bud disappearing and returning at ungodly hours with scrapes and black eyes, or else drunk as hell.  Ed figured he’d been making money somehow; security work or P.I. stuff, most likely, but he didn’t ask.  He just accepted the groceries and beer that materialized in the apartment, the new bathroom mirror that replaced the one Bud punched to shards the first night he’d stayed.  Ed hadn’t asked him about that, either.

Exley was still refusing to wear his glasses fairly regularly, the snide comments irking him more than the challenge of navigating a blurry, unformed world.  He wasn’t sure how having less-than-stellar vision made one a "sissy," exactly, but it was apparently a universal truth.  It got big laughs at the station, anyways.

He worried that he’d finally gotten some evidence to corroborate this claim when Bud came home one night smelling like bourbon and with a terrible gash that had just missed his eye, and got into bed with him. 

Nothing _happened_.  Ed didn’t sleep.  He shifted the furthest away from the other man as possible, still and terrified, breathing shallow, like a rabbit.  The ex-detective, on the other hand, sprawled serenely, his brow stamping a semicolon of blood on his pillow. 

Exley couldn’t see him very well, of course, and he was glad for it.  But the hazy form of the other man had already injured him, strangely, his chest tight.  He remained in the bed until the sun came up, staring resolutely at the ceiling, at the alarm clock, at anything other than the man he barely knew who he'd killed so many people for, killed his _boss_ for. 

Maybe there was something to this glasses thing, he thought.  But he was smart and knew that was fucking stupid.  Either way, it was all very, very inconvenient. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The next night, Bud did the same thing.  Ed would’ve chalked it up to coincidence, to subconscious repetition, if it hadn’t happened a third time, then a fourth.  They didn't talk about it.  Every time, the lieutenant would awake with a start as the weight in the bed shifted, and he would lie there for hours in abject horror, fleeing from the room as soon as the faint shreds of light drifted in through the blinds like he’d been imprisoned or bewitched.  And he couldn’t be sure if he was imagining this part, but he swore that sometimes the man didn’t smell much like bourbon at all.

By the fifth night, Exley was run down.  Nearly a full week without a decent night’s sleep had begun to affect him, his already-blurred vision now occasionally swimming curiously, so when his ex-partner stumbled into the room and collapsed into his bed, Exley made up his mind, turned the light on, and faced him. 

He was about to shake Bud from his stupor and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing when he realized that the other man was already awake and staring at him, his eyes wide and alarmed, twin blue smudges glimmering in the soft light. 

“Bud?” he whispered, wincing when it came out a little hoarse, “what are you…”

“Sorry,” muttered the other man, and scrambled out of the bed as if at gunpoint.  He vanished from the room, and a few minutes later, the detective could hear his front door thud gently shut.  Exley, mystified, lay still for quite some time before switching off the bedside lamp and falling into a troubled sleep.  He dreamed of blood, of dark-swathed figures crawling through his windows, the mattress with his sleeping form propped as a makeshift barrier against the doorway.  Of Bud White shooting out their legs to the frantic ring of his alarm clock. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When he came home from work the next day, there was an oddly conciliatory bottle of relatively pricey whiskey in his liquor cabinet, and his roommate was nowhere to be found.  He was probably mortified by what he’d realized he’d been doing, Ed assumed a little guiltily—he had an unexplainable desire to find Bud and tell him that it was fine, really, even though the sleep loss was making him dizzy and his anxiety was through the roof.  Still, he felt complicit; he should’ve just awakened the man that first night instead of lying there listening to him breathe, smelling the stale cigarettes on his clothes and pressing half-moon indents into his own palms with his fingernails.

So he was probably a little fucked-up, which he guessed was nothing new.

That night, Exley took the bottle of whiskey to bed with him, on edge and resolving to drink himself to sleep if necessary.  He tried to relax, starting a book about the war that ended up making him feel even more uneasy, and when he heard the front door click open, he nearly jumped out of his skin, spilling his liquor on the sheets and feeling ridiculous.  He turned off his light and lay, painfully alert, but the other man never came to his room, much less his bed.  Subtle, muffled sounds of movement issued throughout the house for a time, and then fell silent.

And his disappointment was unplaceable, but surely not good.

Ed tossed and turned for hours, the liquor abandoned, as it seemed that it had only agitated him further.  Maudlin thoughts crept across his mind, vague insidious things about loneliness and how desperately formulaic the world sometimes seemed; that understanding how things worked used to feel like having a key, but lately felt more like a parlor trick, or at worst, a curse.

Finally, he got out of bed with the half-formed notion of getting a glass of water; the whiskey still clung to his teeth, acrid and intolerable.  Exley felt his way along the walls of his hallway, meaning to cross the living-room to get to the kitchen, but he never quite made it.  Bud White was sleeping on his couch, two fresh black eyes hinting at a broken nose, moonlight spilled across his upper half.  It was raining outside, and the light glimmered a little.  And maybe Ed was losing it because of lack of sleep—maybe he half wanted the guy to punch him out so he could get some damn rest, but he stood and stared and tried to make out the blurred near-indecipherable form in the dark, no glasses, not a sissy, and he knelt down and touched his arm and whispered “hey” without a clue as to what he intended to follow it up with.

The other man stirred, blinking. 

“Exley?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Ed said, idiotic, and kissed him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bud made a startled sound, muffled against Ed’s lips, and the detective pulled back, feeling depraved. 

“I – god, sorry, uh – hey, do you want a drink?” Exley floundered, stumbling to his feet and pressing his back against the nearby wall.

“That’s not what I want,” said Bud levelly, sitting up and looking at him in a way that made Ed wonder how he'd ever thought he wasn't very bright.  “I want to know something, though – what do _you_ want?”

“Whatever… you… do?” said Ed, inarticulate, his nerves in freefall, figuring that at this point he’d be okay with any answer, whether it was “I want you to leave” or “I want you.”  In that split second, he’d be fine with moving all of his things out and disappearing if he could do it all in a moment—Bud could keep the house. 

Standing, the taller man approached Exley, close, and fixed him with a look that could almost be described as bemused.

“I want to see where you were going with that.  Assuming you were going somewhere?”

“I think – I’ve never – yeah, okay.”

Edmund Exley had never kissed a man.  He had never kissed very many people at all, really.  Mostly he just focused on achieving his professional goals, which in his line of work generally didn’t involve kissing anyone.  The thing with Lynn had been something of an anomaly—though now it seemed a little too coincidental that he’d slept with her after their entire interaction more or less consisted of her running her mouth about Bud.

“ _Exley_ ,” said Bud, definitely bemused now.

“Call me Ed.”

“Sure thing, _lieutenant_ ,” he leaned in and whispered, insouciant, in his ear, his breath skating across the skin.  A hand playing at the collar of Ed’s shirt, calloused and faintly mocking.

Exley made a sound that was halfway between a moan and growl, completely involuntary, pulled Bud in by the waist and kissed him again.  It was a vast improvement from the last time, because the ex-detective was kissing him back now, hard, insistent, gasping as Ed brushed a thumb against the bullet scar on his cheek. 

And soon, Bud was pulling him down the hall, and he couldn’t see him nearly as well as he’d have liked to, especially when he pushed him down into the bed and made short work of his clothes, Exley feeling thoroughly disarmed and shaking slightly as the man firmly held his hips down with large, unfamiliar hands, and took him into his mouth. 

 

Ed resolved that next time, he’d wear his glasses.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from an excellent Dead Man's Bones song that is way creepier than this fic is.
> 
> I was thinking about the whole impaired vision plot element of L.A. Confidential & how Exley caves in to criticism about his glasses even though it seems like his character would ignore things like that, which strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of a petit gay panic, and I ended up writing this. 
> 
> I guess I only know how to write for small, weird fandoms?
> 
> comments are appreciated :)


End file.
